CN
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
Do not trust Image Travel
We booked with Image Travel Ltd a 5-Day Luxury Lodges Safari for 2 person. The package cost US$ 4,700.
When we arrived at Nairobi Airport on Oct. 1st, nobody picked us up. The phone numbers were both unavailable. When we checked with three of the hotels, we were told there was no booking information.
We reported our situation to police station at the airport. The police cannot contact them either. This is a fraud incident!
My opinion is you cannot trust image travel
US
A complete disappointment and not worth the money.
Accommodations was bad cheap place to stay and no wifi 🛜 in the rooms. You will only see one day of the gorilla and will change your schedule. Keep in mind for 2k there’s better accommodations and trekking but make my mistake if you book with this company. Had to take him to the police station to bring down the amount he wanted. The Chimpanzee is very cheap in Uganda and that’s he’s alternative to make you waste another day and he’s plan to fulfill the other trekkings days he promised. He also stated only Americans complain and I don’t have an education?? Keep in mind trekking in Rwanda cost 1500$ in the park where he will take you it cost 800$ so please do the math. Overall you can find way better tours operators who will provide a much better experience. Safari bookings please look into this matter.
50-65 years of age | Experience level: 2-5 safaris
NaShibe is the most dishonest tour operator I have ever had!
I had a very unpleasant tour with Nashibe, where I found their tours from safari booking.com which I suggest this company should be removed from the website, to avoid more people being cheated by them.
I had an agreement with Caren from the company with a price and lodge accommodation. After my deposit paid, she sent me a almost totally different itinerary. My 7 nights lodge has changed to 3 nights in Camp, 2 nights in a resort which the price was not even as half as my original itinerary booking( showing on the booking.com).
I had to join the tour cos they already took my 30 percent deposit!
The only 2 nights lodge I stayed , one has a big pitfall next to my room! I trapped into it as walking in the dark and injured myself! All they did was just moved me to another room!
The driver we were provided got a bit sick from the first day of safari, I asked if he is ok or do we need change to another driver but he insisted to continue. However everyday we have to negotiate for not finished the safari early and stick with the itinerary plan! We’re literally exhausted by just dealing with him. Not to mention the last day we drove back to Nairobi and he was caught by police cos somehow his license was expired and we were stopped on the road for 2 hours !
US
65+ years of age | Experience level: first safari
I found the owner to be a bit dishonest and deceitful.
First, let me say that if you haven't visited Africa, then you need to put it on your bucket list. Our trip was amazing as far at what we saw in the field. We saw lions in trees, the elusive Cheetah, baby elephants, zebras, hundreds of thousands of Wildebeest on migration, etc.......including a take-down of a Wildebeest by a pride of lions. The staff at all of the lodges were fantastic!! This was an amazing trip!
So now you are asking why the one star. The one star comes from the way we were treated by the owner of the company.
At the beginning, the owner was extremely responsive to our questions. But once we sent in our deposits, he went radio silent. Responses to emails either were delayed by weeks or never happened. I sent three emails in one month and never got a response. And this went on for months. His communications were horrible within our group of six.
We booked semi luxury resorts for the 10-12 days in the field. The first three were great. The fourth was a fantastic place but not what we booked. His reasoning was, it got us closer to the animals. And I will give him kudo's on that, as he was correct and the lodge was semi luxury. But it would have been nice to learn about the change in advance as it added almost 2 hours to the drive that day. At the same time we learned he only booked 2 of 3 park permits. This was a disaster for us as we had to wait almost 2 days for the issue to be resolved, then our guide (who was fantastic) told us he was getting incorrect information from the office and had to deviate from our normal game drive to get to a remote ranger station to get the third day permit. Needless to say our guide (not the owner) was not happy either.
The next two places we stayed were no where near what we expected or paid for. Instead of semi luxury, we got a "Eco-friendly" tent site where some members of our party had no hot water for three days. The last site was also a tented site. When confronted, the owner blamed his office staff for the confusion. Going to our last site I asked him where we were going and he said he did not know. How can you not know where you are taking us? Then he passes the original place we booked and traveled another hour to the last tent site! This site was located in the park, but so far away from the animals we could not go back for our last day.
We confronted him again where he finally admitted that he was afraid to tell us that all of the parks had significantly raised (in some cases quadruple) the entrance fees.
So instead of telling us up front, where we could have come up with an alternate plan, he decided to reduce the quality of the resorts to save money. If he had been open and honest with us we would have probably just paid the difference. Issues do crop up. It's how you deal with them that defines how good you are. But he lost out in the end, after the last tent issue, as we demanded a partial refund or we weren't going to leave the site.
-We were told 6 hour drives from location to location when reality was we drove for 11 hours on some days.
-Their advertised picnics were nowhere near what reality was and one "picnic" was in a parking lot of a gas station.
-Binoculars advertised were not available in some vehicles.
-Advertising ample legroom in the vehicles was not completely accurate.
-He spent a lot of time on the phone instead of talking to us.
-We finally learned that when he said "it's an hour from here" we just added another hour! It was a running joke between us all!
I could go on and on, but I think you get the message I am trying to convey.
The visit to Africa was amazing, but the the tour operator (owner) was a bit dishonest and deceitful to us, and as such I cannot recommend Features Africa Journeys.
US
65+ years of age | Experience level: first safari
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Absolutely visit Africa. The people, land, and animals are amazing. Our contracted drivers/guides for Amboseli, Kenya, and the Serengeti, Tanzania, listened and worked with us through difficult times. We saw more wildlife than we could have imagined. Absolutely visit Africa, but do NOT use the services of Features Africa Journeys.
Our final itinerary showed the list of upgraded lodging as requested and paid for. It was a LIE. Of the 6 listed, we were not informed of any changes until we drove past 4 of them. We were downgraded to tented camps, some with no amenities. One 3-night stay did not even have running hot water.
Estimated drive times were grossly underestimated. Many days were over 10 hours or longer, only leaving the vehicle for lunch. We arrived at all of the lodging as the day turned dark. For every upgraded lodging, we left after breakfast the next day. We did not have any time to enjoy the facilities or amenities. Heck, we didn't have time to even see them .
As a party of 6, with 4 being just under or over 6' tall, we we're assured the vehicle could accommodate us in comfort. We had a terrible time finding leg room. I had bruises on my wrists, head, shoulders, knees, and legs. One guide told us the vehicles are really meant for 4.
Park permits were not paid for in a timely manner. In the Serengeti, we had a 3-night stay but only a 2 night permit. We were informed, if the permit was not paid for, we would have to leave the Serengeti or risk being arrested!
The owner, became our driver when we returned to Kenya. We confronted him about his deceitfulness, asking him to be truthful with us. He looked us in the eye and lied over and over again. We ended our safari early and asked to go directly to the airport.
If I could, I would give this review a zero. I cannot say this enough. DO NOT USE FEATURES AFRICA JOURNEYS.
US
35-50 years of age | Experience level: 2-5 safaris
Compulsive Liar
To be clear, this is NOT a review of our visit to Kenya and Tanzania. This is a review of Features Africa Journeys. We took a 12 day safari tour and the experiences were amazing. Highly recommend visiting Kenya and Tanzania. Just don't do it with features Africa Journeys. The owner, Karanja, downplayed a lot, and made promises he did not keep. The man seems nice in person, but he's actually a shady salesman and a compulsive liar
Save yourself a lot of stress and discomfort and use someone else
Here's an abbreviated list of my issues. More detail below:
1. After first payment customer service and communication ceased.
2. Changing accommodations 3 TIMES after final payment without telling us. To lodges of signficant less quality.
3. Significantly over-promised the amount of space in the safari jeep.
4. Consistent errors in hotel reservations and park passes, risking use getting kicked out of parks.
5. Significantly downplaying the amount of time spent traveling between lodges leading to a lot of missed activities and no down time as promised in the itinerary.
There were plenty of other issues I had with them but my post is already too long.
Here's the details on the above:
1. Initial communications were great! Responsive, friendly, helpful. After our 1st deposit communications came to an end. Days of questions going unanswered, despite our literal begging for a response. The last invoice a month late. We all started researching the company because we were beginning to think it was a scam. Communications did not improve during the trip when we started having issues, detailed below.
2. Changed lodges on us, not once, not twice, but 3 TIMES!!! Without telling us!!! Over half of our trip!!! First lodge added 2 hours one way to our drive. The second lodge he changed without telling us, again, out of our way, and it was a DOWNGRADE. We were finally going to have a couple days where we would have the afternoon off (per our contracted schedule), and I was looking forward to the pool at the lodge we were promised. This place, no pool, no power, no hot water, my mom's phone would not connect to the wifi. No afternoon off. After the 2nd change we even had a discussion with Karanja about it, and again he didn't tell us then about the 3rd change. We found out when we drove past the lodge we were supposed to be at. After explicitly asking earlier that day. Another downgrade, another 2hrs out of our way. Of course the last lodges of the trip so we got to end our vacation on a sour note.
3. Said there would be plenty of room for 6 in the jeep, including the 3 people were of above average height. We were all uncomfortable and in pain, even the shorter people. I have bruised elbows and knees from the drives. Told by another tour driver that the trucks really weren't meant for more than.
4. The first hotel reservations were the wrong dates. We had to pull teeth to correct it despite being painfully explicit how many nights were needed. Find out half way thru the trip our Serengeti permit was wrong too. We were only paid in full for 2 nights instead of the planned 3. At 4pm the day before we would have been forced to leave the park, he sent us a message LYING that it's all figured out, only to find out it was paid 3 hours after his message from our driver. And then we had to drive 7 hours out of our way the next day to pick it up. At the end of our trip, turns out we don't have permit for Lake Nakuru Park either!!! Karanja claimed that "the system needed to be refreshed" but we had caught him in SO MANY LIES at this point we knew it was just more BS.
5. Drives between lodges that we were told were only going to take 3 hours took 8 hours, drives that were supposed to take 6 hours took 11 hours. All of it on water-logged, potholed, lose-your-lunch dirt roads. For 11 hours!!! We missed promised sunset dinners, assuming we didn't skip them completely due to exhaustion, there were lodges we paid a lot of money for that we never got to see during the day, almost no down time at any point, and many lunches were extremely late, 2 or 3 pm. One of our drivers said he'd never work for Features again because of how miserable the timeline was. Even when Karanja was driving us personally, he'd look us in the eye and LIE, telling us 10min when there was 2hrs of driving left.
DE
35-50 years of age | Experience level: first safari
SCAM
We booked a 10-day Safari with them. Everything seemed to be fine, there was a website, a responsive e-mail-address, a reachable phone number, an office address and plenty of reviews and social media activity.
Early in the morning on the supposed day of departure I was contacted by the alleged tour guide claiming the company is no longer reachable, the website had been taken offline, the phone number went dead and their various social media accounts were deleted. They appeared to have taken the money and run.
I will not go deep into details here, but our Safari adventure started off with stressful days in a hotel in Nairobi and visits to a local police station.
In case these guys have ever legitimately existed, they've apparently resorted to other business techniques by now. What I am more inclined to believe, is that they have pulled off a scam after putting quite some effort into it, maintaining a website, faking dozens of reviews and feeding various social media accounts.
CN
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
This travel angency ruined our trip totally, don't choose it.
This is a very terrible travel agency
Took all our money, but did not perform the contract to pay for our hotel and park fees included in the contract, we had to pay extra by ourselves.
And we spend extra time to communicate with the travel agency hoping the problem can be solved, but now they can't get in touch. So we have to call the police to defend our rights.
It wastes us almost $6,000 per person and two days of Safari, ruining our trip totally. Don't choose it.
Plus, this company only has three full-time employees.Our guide also has not received his oil and labor fees, and will no longer cooperate with the travel agency in the future.
CN
35-50 years of age | Experience level: first safari
They’re just a three-person operation and can’t even pay the driver’s fees. It's infuriating!
The travel agency demanded full payment two weeks before our departure, despite the fact that we had already paid a deposit months earlier. Out of caution and naïve trust, we communicated and retained a small portion of the final payment. However, after arriving in Kenya, the owner, William, came to collect the remaining balance and then disappeared. We later discovered that the subsequent six nights of hotels and park entrance fees had not been paid. They repeatedly deceived us, exploiting our trust and isolating us in a foreign country, forcing us to continuously cover expensive costs. As a result, we have not only lost time but are also facing potential losses exceeding $20,000.
CN
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
A journey filled with wits and courage, yet also extremely exhausting
The travel agency is really outrageous! For the hotels and tickets we booked for a total of six nights, they didn't make the payment and reservation. We only found out when we arrived at the hotel. They even asked us to pay in advance and then promised to refund us. But now, they have lost contact! Moreover, they arbitrarily changed the agreed hotel in the travel contract without notifying us in advance at all! They replaced the hotel in Nakuru with a substitute hotel that is more than twice as cheap, but they didn't refund the price difference either! They have deceived us by various means many times and delayed time, making our itinerary a total mess. They have greatly wasted our time and caused us to lose one day's itinerary in Masai Mara. What on earth is this?